Carl Sagan: We Are One Planet

A stirring speech by the legendary cosmologist Carl Sagan, on the evolution of human consciousness. Decades old but still highly applicable today.

"More of us flee from war, oppression and famine today, than at any other time in human history, and the world impoverishes itself by spending a trillion dollars a year on preparations for war and employing, perhaps, half the scientists and high technologists on the planet in military endeavours.

We have heard the rationals offered by the superpowers, we know who speaks for the nations, but who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth?

Shouldn't we consider in every nation, major changes in the traditional ways of doing things? a fundamental restructuring of economic, political, social and religious institutions. We've reached a point where there can be no special interests or special cases, nuclear arms threaten every person on the Earth.

Fundamental changes in society are sometimes labelled impractical, or contrary to human nature, as if nuclear war was practical or as if there only one human nature - but fundamental changes can clearly be made, we're surrounded by them.

In the last two centuries, abject slavery, which was with us for thousands of years, has almost be entirely been eliminated in a stirring worldwide revolution. Women, systematically mistreated for millennia, are gradually gaining the political and economic power traditionally denied to them. A new consciousness is developing which see's the Earth as a single organism, and recognises that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet." - Carl Sagan

Philosophy   The Big Picture
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